“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”

Why leave one of the brand new, larger pipelines undamaged, so that Russia could then offer after the event to work with Germany to activate it? Which naturally they did.

This pipeline had been completed but activation was stopped due to the start of the war. If Germany had capitulated and activated it with Russia that would be a major political win for Russia and blow for the suggested goals of the US and other allies. To me this seems to be the biggest hole in the theory that the US was responsible.

Both NS 1 and NS 2 were sabotaged.

The US have been hostile for a long time to Germany getting closer to Russia. The war in Ukraine has just been a convenient event to push their strategic agenda forward and so far, irrespective of those pipelines, it has been very good for the US.

Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 are not just two pipelines. It's four total. The two pipelines of Nord Stream 1 were demolished. But only one of the pipelines of Nord Stream 2 was demolished, the second was untouched.

https://www.dw.com/en/putin-offers-europe-gas-through-nord-s...

Without going meta, how about ... the bomb just didn't work?

Another thing that gets overlooked is that in the months prior to the explosion, Russia had cut off the gas and lied about the reasons why it was cut off twice. Europe kept asking them to send the gas Russia had agreed to send, and Russia kept making up false excuses for not sending it. And then the pipelines exploded, giving them an actual excuse.

The pipe that survived? It would need Germany to backtrack on sanctions to open it. Russia said the gas was ready to flow as soon as they did so.

I'm not sure how 3 out of 4 instead 4 out of 4 (which we don't know why, might have failed, might not have been possible) says anything about who might have done it.

For an elaborate operation like this as described in Hersh's story, would you rig just one? Or would you have multiple redundancies? Is it likely that all of the redundancies failed on the same pipeline, that is also the new pipeline?

This comeback applies to whoever did the job. Americans or Russians, or Knights Templar, this was an elaborate operation, and somehow one pipeline out of four did not blow up. Why? Why does this implicate more the Americans rather than anyone else?

Start from the beginning.[1] The point is there is no good reason for the US to leave one operational, defeating the whole purpose suggested by those claiming the US did it, and worse, leaving open the possibility of a major political victory for Russia. This is a big hole in the theory that the US did it. There may be good reasons for other parties to leave one operational though. You can speculate.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34712780

> Why leave one of the brand new, larger pipelines undamaged ...

Two possibilities:

(1) explosive charge malfunctioned

(2) make plausible arguments that it was Russia who did it

(1): See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713247

(2): Then why blow the other three?

So for the US angle to work here what is the motivation?

At the outset of the war Germany stopped NS2 activation plans and started diversifying its energy away from Russia.

Leading up to the explosion Russia had been trying to blackmail Germany by reducing the supplies of gas. And gas was fully turned off at the time of the explosion. Russia was also playing games with Germany to try to get propaganda wins over the subject of gas by cutting gas supplies on NS1 and saying it was because Germany needed to ship it a turbine. Then Russia was claiming it couldn't receive the turbine from Germany because of the sanctions imposed by other countries. Russia was also saying, well pity that we can't supply enough gas because we don't have the turbine, but we could activate NS2 with you instead. [1]

So the clear motivation for the US could be that they did not want Germany to capitulate to Russian blackmail and give Russia some kind of political or sanction relief. That's actually somewhat reasonable as a theory if you believe Germany was susceptible to it (was it?), and assume all the other levers that the US and other EU allies had wouldn't be enough to keep Germany on the team.

The risk is that doing this and being caught would be a huge breach of trust. The claim of Hersh is that these explosives sat on the pipeline for three months.

The US even warned Germany about potential attacks on the pipeline. [2]

So now if that is the motivation, in this context leaving one of the newer, larger NordStream 2 pipelines untouched would make absolutely no sense. As you leave open the possibility for Germany to still capitulate and worse give Russia a massive propaganda win by forcing Germany to reverse its position and activate NS2.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/business/germany-russia-g... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/cia-warned-berlin-about-possib...

Wouldn’t they have found an unexploded bomb by now?

This may be a detail that only investigators know and hasn’t been made public.